Having become perhaps the only remaining premier 8kX specific experience, DCS World support is part of the Pimax Vision 8kX product. Even before delivering 8kX units to backers, Pimax’s responsibility is to ensure they will work well with DCS World. As it is, Pimax and both communities would be fortunate if Eagle Dynamics of DCS World took on official 8kX support. Therefore, it is my strong opinion that whatever few 8kX units Eagle Dynamics of DCS World may need, are part of the production process, and should be prioritized even above delivering to backers. I do not believe that is or should be controversial.
Many use cases for DCS World run the most modern hardware available to within 10%-20% of frame dropping failure or substantial loss of visual quality (below ~1.5 TotalSR on 8kX). Due to thin performance margins is critically important that Eagle Dynamics be in the loop when continuing to push DCS World updates, even to their betas.
Personally, I could not justify taking an 8kX away from Eagle Dynamics even to get one a full year earlier. And yes, I say that as someone who has been waiting eagerly for that exact hardware from before Pimax existed, someone who paid for an 8kX, someone who has been lucky enough to receive one of the very few preproduction units, and someone who has done substantial DCS World testing with the 8kX in the hopes of helping the same communities. I would expect that had I knowingly done so the community would correctly be in uproar against me. The mere possibility of such an exact tradeoff caused me some trepidation at the NYC Roadshow.
Words of support from the Pimax community on this would be appreciated.
DISCLAIMER: I do not currently work for Pimax, and am stating my own opinion, not their policy.
Point is to eliminate any shadow of doubt for Pimax that it is ethical if they send an 8kX to Eagle Dynamics of DCS World before anywhere else, and the community overall will not raise some huge uproar of controversy over it.
That’s a fair point. Half the reason is because DCS World has readability requirements, that other games don’t have. The other half is that DCS World has much thinner performance margins, which other games don’t have.
With FDev pulling out of VR, DCS World is becoming a unique category I think.
If the headset you backed didn’t support SteamVR, Oculus API, or anything similar currently supported by existing VR apps, would you still be satisfied just to get it?
If yes, then I think you must be a developer. And perhaps yes, developers who backed the 8kX perhaps should get priority over any other developers.
But as a consumer product, it’s not finished until it’s ready for the end-user’s reasonable expectations. I think DCS World is part of that deal for enough people, and is teetering too close to the edge of failure, that Pimax needs to invest a little in it.
Nah. I can setup an offline installation on a separate disk if I have to, and I don’t get to spend enough time in DCS World as it is. I actually would have preferred Elite Dangerous as a game, but FDev never showed any real interest AFAIK.
Probably more will be buying the 8kX specifically for DCS World than for any other specific game. So, perhaps 5% will be buying the 8kX for DCS World, maybe 10% for Elite Dangerous but that’s going away now, and maybe 1% specifically want the 8kX to play… Beat Saber similar stuff?
@DrWilken
Keep in mind, there was a representative from a flight sim group of former F-5 pilots at the NYC roadshow. They reportedly all have Pimax headsets, and they guy literally piloted a 787 up to NYC to get a demo.
But prioritizing FDev wouldn’t be any different in my opinion.
The majority of the community probably wouldn’t find it to be OK (though I personally think Pimax should send lots of units to the big/important studios)…
I disagree in some way: Send one to Valve first. Update Doc on how to integrate the headsets properly (“Hello Pimax” code example). Get a Dev-line so Developers can communicate with Pimax and not receive word salad after 3 weeks. And then you can send to 1CGS in Moscow for IL-2 Great Battles Flight Simulator and to Eagle Dynamics if you will.
Valve, unfortunately, cannot be bothered to even fix things like the output mirror used by OBS, after like a month and a half now. I think any 8kX sent to them would be wasted, frankly. Same problem with FDev now.
As for IL-2, is it as much in danger of failing to work properly with an 8kX? On a 5k+ for example, are you running at 10%-20% margins to get something like a TotalSR of 2.0 without frame dropping?
As far as I know, Valve already have our headsets.
The point @mirage335 is making here is legit. Making DCS better and optimized for Pimax is an important piece of the progress. There’s not many VR games or simulators that needs the same amount of effort as DCS World does. Not only because is a very GPU-heavy simulator which suffers from a low frame rate in general, but also because its one of the most popular VR simulators out there, that even our military partners use in certain cases.
Once the Covid19 pandemic is over, I hope to finally visit the DCS team at their office as planned before already. We can make huge things together, especially with 8KX, eye tracking, hand tracking etc.
But at the same time, we all know we first have backers to fulfill, backer upgrades as well, and of course all thousands of pre-orders. Once the pre-order production line is up in decent numbers (which it should be in August or September), we will send units to DCS devs as well as others. This will benefit all of us.
Meanwhile, I dont see how any of us, theoretically, could benefit from BeatSaber devs getting a Pimax? Isnt 99% of the VR games already working great with Pimax? Sure Parallel Projection would be one thing, but question is - how much does each of the developers really care since the mainstream guy is still playing around with his OG HTC Vive Rift S, or even Quest…
DCS is one of my games, but I will more likely be playing a myriad of other games I own. I don’t want to delay the delivery of my headset. DCS World and other developers will get their samples soon enough. I feel they can wait in the proper order just like the rest of us.
